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Enterprise IT bucks fly to the cloud

But traditional spending to slip...for the next five years

Spending on traditional IT infrastructure will decline in the face of a shift to the cloud, IDC has predicted, but the old style of IT will still retain a majority of customers’ dollars at the end of this decade. Just.

The research firm said today that total spending on cloud IT infrastructure will grow by 24.1 per cent this year to $32.6bn, with public cloud accounting for $20.5bn of that. Those numbers cover server, storage and ethernet switch - and exclude double counting on server and storage - and span public and private cloud.

This means the cloud will count for just under a third of IT infrastructure spend in 2015, compared to 27.6 per cent last year. Spending on traditional infrastructure kit will drop 1.6 per cent this year, to a still chunky $66.8bn.

The pattern will continue right through the decade, the number crunchers said, with spending on traditional IT showing -1.7 per cent CAGR, to hit just over $62bn by 2016.

Meanwhile, cloud IT infrastructure overall will show 15.1 per cent CAGR, to hit $53.1bn by 2019, giving it 46 per cent of the take overall. Public cloud will continue to dominate, growing at 16.3 per cent CAGR to his $33.6bn by 2019, while private cloud will grow 13.2 per cent CAGR to top out at $19.4bn in 2019.

"End users often cite the agility of IT infrastructure and economic reasons as drivers for cloud adoption,” said Natalya Yezhkova, IDC’s research director, storage systems in a statement. “But we also expect that the proliferation of next generation applications born and run in the cloud will fuel its further growth."

Interestingly, servers will be the dominant spending category this year, with 25 per cent growth, though storage and ethernet will still show 20 per cent plus growth. Either way, whether it's in the cloud, or in the data centre, enterprises will be hoovering up tin for some time to come. ®